how to blog your books

Should be easy, right? After all, many of us set a word count quota for the day’s writing, somewhere in the thousands of words. Surely we can spare 200 or so for a short blog. But deciding what to write about is what always stops me from blogging. Who am I as a writer? Do you really want to hear about the Green Veggie Smoothie I just made with my food processor, throwing in fresh pineapple, cucumbers, apples, spinach, lettuce, grapes, cucumber, and orange, and how it tastes like the smell of watering my garden early in the morning, before the sun is high, with hummingbirds duking it out overhead to get to the feeder above me?

Or smells like sunlight coming through the leaves. After all, I’m a poet. I need to exercise these metaphor muscles the way gardens need water and fertilizer.

But you didn’t come here to this title about blogging in order to hear that — did you? That’s the dilemma of the literary blogger. We have a tendency to get personal, to get specific, and to ignore the title topic until almost the end of the blog.

Plus, they say you have to add lots of visuals to your blogs if you want anyone reading them. We just can’t read any more without illustrations. Here’s my smoothie.

My writing process is pretty much like going to work every day. I reserve two hours from the moment I open my eyes (with coffee — here’s another visual) and before I get started working at the mundane job, for creative writing. I’m disciplined about it, but I count everything as writing, even reading about how to write (though not reading about how to market books — that’s death to the creative flow, though very necessary in other zones of the day.)

My writing process is sort of effortless once I’m in the zone of those two hours. I know you hated hearing that, but it’s true. Assigning a regular time is like waving huge bars of chocolate in front of my Muse. She can’t resist.

So there you have it. One article of how-to, a fair amount of personal with a dash of wit (I hope), and a lot of pictures. Author blogging. It was fun!

Visit http://RachelDacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.